Trent Parke

"You shoot a lot of shit and you're bound to come up with a few good ones," says Trent Parke. Parke has shot a whole lot of shit in his time and come up with a whole load of good ones - in work that portrays his native Australia in a spiritual, apocalyptic and personal light with intimations of life, death and rebirth thrown in for good measure.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Trent a couple of years ago, and a more honest and down-to-earth photographer you couldn't hope to meet. I also saw his Minutes to Midnight dummy and it was phenomenal - but not published as a book yet. You can hear Trent Parke talking about his work here.

He's since moved on to colour work, but I don't know what he's doing now - taking a rest perhaps. Anyway, here is my interview for the BJP with Trent Parke.


“I love taking pictures,” says Trent Parke, “and I love Australia. It’s the only place I want to photograph.” Parke’s dual passions have resulted in a body of work that portrays Australia in a revelatory light, a light that is as revealing of Parke’s own psyche as it is of Australia itself.

“My mum died when I was 10 and it changed everything about me,” says Parke. “It made me question everything around me.” Soon after his mother’s death, Parke began taking photographs with an old Pentax, and his questioning became visual. “Photography is a discovery of life which makes you look at things you’ve never looked at before. It’s about discovering yourself and your place in the world.”


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Jacob Aue Sobol - Sabine

Greenland is the next setting for a photographic exploration of emotion and place, this time in another interview I did - with Jacob Aue Sobol for Gomma Magazine. Sobol's Sabine is a beautiful book which captures a time and place through the photographer's love affair with Sabine.



“When I was a child, my father gave me a book called The Diary of a Hunter. It showed Greenland and the changes that were taking place there. I finally visited Greenland when I was a student. I wanted to show the culture clash between the traditional and the modern. I went to Tiniteqilaaq, a settlement with 150 people. I had 2 rules while I was out there - no pictures of icebergs or empty beer bottles.

After 5 weeks, I got home, developed my film and realised I had only photographed the clichés of Greenland, so I went again and stayed with a priest called Hans. I went hunting with him and on one trip, I saw a seal - the rule is that if you see an animal first, you kill it. Hans gave me the gun and I shot the seal. It was the first animal I had ever killed and it changed my relationship with Greenland forever.

Then I fell in love with Sabine and started living with her and her family. Now, instead of coming home with exposed film, I wanted to come home with fish or fur. I started using my compact camera to record my emotions with Sabine. I was fascinated by the spontaneous way she expressed her joy, her fear, her sorrow and I tried to capture that in my photographs.

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Stephen Gill

Following on from the US, China and Indonesia, it's only fair to move on to London - a city where the living environment is being destroyed in the name of development, progress and the Olympics.

Stephen Gill is incredibly productive and has a huge body of work, using a wide range of strategies - toy cameras, collage, rephotography, burying his pictures - to make his work. I'm not always convinced by what he does, but when I am, as in Hackney Flowers for example, it is amazingly fresh, original and beautiful.

It also provides a new perspective on London and captures the soul of a place that is unloved but beautiful and lived in, a counterpoint to the soulless, materialist facadism of the London of the 2012 Olympics, and a reminder that the heart and culture of a city can belong outside the visible and accepted spaces.


As Gill says on his website, "Hackney Wick sits in east London between the Grand Union Canal, the River Lea and the Eastway A106. I first came across the area at the end of 2002 when I was photographing the back of advertising billboards. Although I had lived in London for nine years and thought I knew East London well, Hackney Wick threw me; it completely changed my mental map of this part of London.

My first visit was on a Sunday, to the market which used to take place in the old greyhound/speedway stadium. The vast market was like no other I had seen before. At first glance, apart from few pot plants, most of the items on sale looked like scrap. It was not a market for luxury goods; it seemed to exist for people who were struggling to keep afloat themselves: exhausted white goods, mountains of washing machines and fridges, copper wire and other scrap metals stripped from derelict buildings; piles of old VHS videos which had been forced out of people’s homes to make way for DVDs.

That day I bought a plastic camera at the market for 50p; it had a plastic lens with no focus or exposure controls. I started making pictures with it at once. Over the next two years I visited Hackney Wick again and again. Hackney has long provided a refuge for immigrants and asylum seekers from all over the world and for me Hackney Wick especially reflects the great diversity of London.

The market closed on 13th July, 2003; it had been going for seven years. According to the Trading Standards inspectors it had been swamped with stolen and counterfeit goods. The remains of the old stadium were demolished weeks after the closure as part of the preparations for London’s bid for the 2012 games. The games which will bring many good things to the area: new transport links and much needed infrastructure. But there will be losses, too. There is another side to Hackney Wick. Away from the noise and chaos nature has somehow managed to find and keep a place for itself. The canals and rivers and secret allotments (known only to their dedicated gardeners) are home to many birds and animals. These hidden paradises have a vibrancy of their own which will soon be muted by the dust that will cover them."

Sze Tsung Leong

Sze Tsung Leong's images of China's urban construction/destruction boom share a sentiment of Paul Graham's - that an environment denuded of public space and historical functionality. Like Graham's work, they also have a subtext of the gaps between rich and poor.

At the same time, though, Sze recognizes that there are other layers of history that don't change - that the "...appearance of the cities may be entirely different, but the inner workings hehind these changes still persist, the hierarchies of power, the relationship of the individual to the majority."

What is so interesting about China and the modern urban development that Sze's images show, is the way these hierarchies of power are being overlaid by a new image of China - that of the modern, developed country capable of being a world class economy/cultural venue/sporting competitor and so on. It's all a facade, as this interview in Guernica (via Conscientious/Exposure Compensation) explains, but with the Beijing Olympics coming up, we're going to be seeing a lot more on the mythical new China - Chinoiserie for the 2000s?

images copyright Sze Tsung Leong

Garry Winogrand

A Garry Winogrand quote for Paul Graham.

"A photograph can only look like how the camera saw what was photographed. Or, how the camera saw the piece of time and space is responsible for how the photograph looks. Therefore, a photograph can look any way. Or there's no way a photograph has to look (beyond being an illusion of a literal description). Or, there are no external or abstract or preconceived rules of design that can apply to still photographs.

I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing it as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.

I photograph to see what things look like photographed."

image copyright Garry Winogrand

Ditte Harlov Johnsen

A more gentle take on mothers and children from
Ditte Haarlov Johnsen (via Conscientious) - look at the accompanying letters the young mothers wrote.

annet van der voort

Annet van der Voort looks at young mothers with their new borns in a direct way that captures something of the physical and emotional trauma of becoming a mother. There's a real sense of fatigue in there and I like the feeling of the frailty of mother and child.

Lucy Levene

I have a Sofa Portrait up at the National Portrait Gallery for the Photographic Prize exhibition . It is a great place to exhibit but as usual the exhibition has that thrown together feel.

Part of the problem is there are so many images on similar themes sitting side by side, another is that documentary (Jonathan Torgovnik, Michelle Sank) is shown next to celebrity portraiture (Nadav Kander/Julia Fullerton-Batten), fashion-ish photography (Julieta Sans), personal work (Harry Borden/David Stewart) and up and coming photojournalism (Ivor Prickett).

As soon as you dig a little deeper though, things begin to emerge - the exhibition is a starting point. That's definitely the case with Lucy Levene's work. I first saw her series Marrying In, on potential Jewish partners for her, at the Hereford Photography Festival in 2004. Her wonderful prints of her standing with her potential partners were stuck in a busy corridor of an FE college in the Hereford boondocks. But there is something special about her world-weary pissed-offness and changing faces of her detached partners - openness, interest and disdain - set against a changing backdrop of British interiors. In her latest images, Matthew, Luke and Mark, she's holding hands with her partners in bedsit type rooms - maybe she's choosing her own partners, maybe she's moving out, who knows? Whatever, it's a very English series that combines layers of the cultural, religious and personal.